An interesting story from yesterday’s comments:
The First World War will officially end on Sunday, 92 years after the guns fell silent, when Germany pays off the last chunk of reparations imposed on it by the Allies.
The final payment of £59.5 million, writes off the crippling debt that was the price for one world war and laid the foundations for another.
Germany was forced to pay the reparations at the Treaty of Versailles in 1919 as compensation to the war-ravaged nations of Belgium and France and to pay the Allies some of the costs of waging what was then the bloodiest conflict in history, leaving nearly ten million soldiers dead.
The initial sum agreed upon for war damages in 1919 was 226 billion Reichsmarks, a sum later reduced to 132 billion, £22 billion at the time.
This goes to show how dangerous debt is, and justifies a lot of the Villager fear about the size of our debt.
Consider this an open thread.
meh
Alan Grayson on Twitter:
SP
A lot of people will not get your joke. This just shows that we all need to watch what we say in these times.
Mark S.
Yeah, Germany never recovered and remains an economic midget to this day.
Moses2317
Check out my new blog post on the Democrats’ record on increasing and reforming student loans.
Winning Progressive
Athenae
People who made cracks about Europe, especially the French, during the Iraq War run-up didn’t know shit about World War I and how awful it was. They lost millions.
There was a lot of stupid floating around back then but that shit continues to enrage me. I remember the news stories about people pouring French wine down storm drains and shit. Hee hee, isn’t it hilarious.
A.
WereBear
Well, I feel slightly better about my own crushing debt. I had no idea it was still going on. Somehow.
We are getting a lot of help with the new kitten, Tristan, thanks to our 18 month old tortoiseshell, Olwyn. Her first reaction to the furry little slug we brought home was, Couldn’t you find one that worked?
But once he demonstrated he could learn things like eat from a dish and walk without falling over, she’s decided he’s minion material.
Click here to see the two of them.
beltane
Wow, Hitler murdered millions of innocent people but he couldn’t manage to walk away from reparations payments. What will Glenn Beck say about this?
beltane
@Athenae: Most Americans have no idea whatsoever about the suffering Europeans endured during both world wars. We are like the glibertarians in that respect.
Does anyone think we could rebound so fast after that type of experience?
WereBear
We once did amazing things.
We can again.
maya
WWI was about the dacaying aristocracy of Europe having it’s final family feud in the middle of the growing industrialization of their world. The reverse of what is happening here in Reel America, today. The debt is just additional gunpowder.
gbear
Cool. TPM posts a picture of Christine Fucking O’Donnell with Ozzie Fucking Osborne.
Athenae
@beltane: We lost three thousand on 9/11 and went BATSHIT FUCKING INSANE. Not to minimize those deaths, but Jesus H, the Japanese are our allies now and we threw them in camps and dropped atomic bombs on them. Our stories about the war aren’t about the war. They’re about how we have to remember the war.
I remember reading about a village where the men enlisted en masse in a pals’ regiment during World War I. Their position was overrun, and there was not a man left in the whole town between the ages of 15 and 60. If the Somme wasn’t hell, it was as close as it gets, and we lecture them about courage.
A.
DonkeyKong
Germany should have put itself on the “Do not call list”
Lauren
God-for-the-win!
Linda Featheringill
@Moses2317:
Good article on making a good education available to lots of people.
Good work!
Anne Laurie
@beltane:
__
Way it was explained to me, many of our ancestors came here specifically so they wouldn’t have to “rebound… after that type of experience”. (One grandfather emigrated after the Royal Irish Constabulary was “reconstituted” into the Black & Tans. On the other side, a great-grandfather is supposed to have been paid to leave Munster to serve as a “replacement” for a well-to-do Real American(tm) dodging the Civil War draft.)
But, yeah to Doug’s point: An obsession with ‘national debt’ is a handy tool for those at the top of the income pyramid, but it never works out well for the rest of us!
Kristine
@WereBear: That kitten is adorable. Olwyn looks…smug? Content? “Give me a kitten until he is cat, and I will give you a minion.”
r€nato
@Athenae: I share your feelings of lingering disgust with wingnuts and other assorted ignoramii who think that bashing the French is as fresh and timely as Gallagher smashing watermelons. Whenever I hear some cobag engaging in French-bashing, I remind them that they were proved fucking right about the Iraq war. They usually change the subject after that remark.
(they also get better health care and pay much less for it)
Another inconvenient fact for the “USA #1!” crowd: the USSR lost many millions in WW2 and did as much, if not more, to liberate Europe from the Nazis. There was that whole Eastern front business, after all.
Linda Featheringill
@beltane:
We may have to find out in the next few decades.
Alex
Austerity: working like a charm in Ireland and now Ecuador too.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/oct/01/ecuador-president-police-attack
Steve
@DonkeyKong: They did. The reason they’re still paying off the debt is because Hitler didn’t make the payments for about a dozen years.
r€nato
@Athenae:
How about Vietnam? We bombed the shit out of them, killed, what? a million? two million? poisoned their land with Agent Orange. Killed so many with that horrible napalm.
And they want to be our friends and do business with us! Just imagine if that shoe had been on our foot.
r€nato
@beltane: Has any economist ever explained to this vast nation of American exceptionalists that the reason we were so prosperous after WW2 was that much of the industrialized world had been leveled by war and we were the only ones left standing largely untouched?
Just Some Fuckhead
@r€nato: I usually remind folks that without the French, we’d still be paying out the nose for tea.
Ivan Ivanovich Renko
@meh: Half baked Alaskan.
Gold, I tell you, gold.
Linda Featheringill
@r€nato:
WWII:
The Allies could not have won the war at all if the USSR didn’t have it already half won.
The rulers of USSR were only moderately effective in a wartime situation, but the people on the ground fought like badgers, inch by inch by inch.
Just Some Fuckhead
@gbear: Hard to tell with Ozzy whether it’s him or a life-sized poster of him.
Steve
@r€nato: If you’re the kind of person who believes Paul Krugman, he debunked that myth just the other day.
Mark S.
@Linda Featheringill:
That’s the damn truth, and I would say they did much more than half. I read once that ninety percent of the casualties Germany suffered were on the Eastern front.
The war between Germany and the USSR was on a scale hardly imaginable.
Belafon (formerly anonevent)
OT: Heres’s a disturbing image, imagine their offspring.
Amanda in the South Bay
@Linda Featheringill:
And the USSR couldn’t have won (or at the least penetrated very far past the pre-war boarder of the USSR) without American lend lease-trucks, lots of trucks, food, boots, etc.
JD Rhoades
My favorite quote on this news story comes from writer David Terrenoire: “They must have taken out a student loan.”
Just Some Fuckhead
@Linda Featheringill:
Yeah, the threat of being shot by your own commanders if you turned around has a way of focusing the mind.
J.W. Hamner
We cooked six Neapolitan pizzas this week… 4 tonight, using J. Kenji Lopez-Alt’s “skillet-broiler” method at Serious Eats. It works really well, though I’d recommend a cast iron skillet since cleaning a regular one is such a pain afterwards. The great thing about it, besides the awesome “leopard spotting” is that it doesn’t require heating up a pizza stone for an hour at 550 like most recipes. It’s quite quick.
Here’s a pic of the method in action. Also? Swiss chard and goat cheese make an awesome pizza.
arguingwithsignposts
Since this is an OT, an e-newsletter about this site just arrived in my inbox. Probably others are familiar with it, but if not, this is a cool site with games that teach social lessons: http://www.gamesforchange.org/play
Moses2317
@Linda Featheringill: Thanks, Linda!
I also came across this post about how the health care reform provisions that recently took effect help young adults facing illnesses such as cancer. It is quite informative.
Winning Progressive
Sly
@Athenae:
It’s not just raw numbers, either. 15% of France’s population was killed or wounded during WWI, and they were overwhelmingly men. If this country lost 15 million men, and another 30 million wounded, we’d lose our shit in a heartbeat.
There were so many war widows that they actually became the foundation of France’s modern welfare state. And the government actually banned contraception, and made the penalties for abortion the severest in all of Europe, over fears of depopulation.
Regnad Kcin
@Linda Featheringill: Of course, it’s hard to do anything other than fight for every inch, when your own comrades are waiting to shoot you if you turn back.
KG
I know that Doug is being snarky about the debt issue, but… some would argue that the rise of Hitler and the Nazis was due in part to Germany’s terrible economy, which was worse than everyone else’s because of very high reparation payments. A fading power, with a weakened economy, and a mountain of debt is a dangerous creature. It is one of the lessons of WWI… the other, to me, at least, is that if you do not stay around to help rebuild a nation after a war, you’ll be there fighting again within a generation.
KipKrao
For WWI, as a French guy I can attest how much this has affected us and all families. I have a grandfather who died somewhere in the balkans whereas the other would wake up screaming every single night for the following 20 years. Verdun did that to people.
For WWII, some say that if the US had not come, French people would be speaking German. Actually no. We would be speaking Russian. And hell am I grateful that we did not end up speaking Russian (the grammar is so hard).
KG
@KipKrao: I don’t know, if the US had not entered, and Vinchy France dropped out of the war, the Germans might have focused on their eastern front while just bombing the British into submission.
That's Master of Accountancy to You, Pal (JMN)
@Mark S.:
It’s more complicated than that. While an overwhelming proportion of the casualties (except PoWs) were on the Eastern Front, a much smaller proportion of Germany’s equipment was destroyed there. While the war they fought against the US and Britain didn’t take relatively many people, it took an immense amount of material. The Bismarck and the Tirpitz each weighed 45,000 tons. A Panzer III, of which there were about 250 in a panzer division, weighed 25 tons. The Germans built over 700 Type VII U-Boats, each of which weighed over 700 tons. A large proportion of the Luftwaffe was destroyed by the western allies.
Neither the Soviets nor the Western Allies could have defeated Germany by themselves, at least not once France fell.
arguingwithsignposts
Oh, joy, we’re going to refight WWII in the open thread.
(I keed, I keed)
Loneoak
Goddamned Oakland PD murdered an elderly, arthritic pet lab because she posed a serious enough threat to their well being to draw and discharge a firearm.
When I spit out scenarios of needing to call police to my house, I find myself thinking twice knowing that my pit mix would bark like hell at them. At this point I feel like it’s a 50/50 proposition that they would just shoot her for that in my living room.
That's Master of Accountancy to You, Pal (JMN)
@Just Some Fuckhead:
Not really. It was the conduct of the Germans that concentrated the mind more than anything else. As a big factor in how hard the Red Army fought, Order 227 is overrated. For one thing, it came a year after the Soviets started fighting so hard.
Amanda in the South Bay
@That’s Master of Accountancy to You, Pal (JMN):
I’d argue that its possible for the US to have defeated Germany all alone, even if Britain and the Soviet Union are knocked out.
Edit: can someone tell my why my links don’t work?
That's Master of Accountancy to You, Pal (JMN)
Staying on topic, Eddie’s surgery went well. He gets to stay at the hospital for a few days because he will need to wear a bandage and have it changed. Given his well demonstrated capacity to get out of any bandage invented by veterinary science and the unlikelihood of being able to get him in the box to go in several days in a row, I thought it best to leave him there. It’s interesting, given that he never had to have a bandage after having his leg amputated, and he came home within 48 hours.
After that, I need to set up any litter box he can get to with just paper in it so that he doesn’t get litter stuck to his paw.
That's Master of Accountancy to You, Pal (JMN)
@Amanda in the South Bay: I think the chance of a strategic bombing campaign winning the war by itself are so miniscule that we can just dismiss the idea.
Amanda in the South Bay
@That’s Master of Accountancy to You, Pal (JMN):
Not using conventional weapons.
Delia
When I was a kid (around 1959 or so) there was an old man who sat at the very back of our church during services (this was a small town) and constantly mumbled to himself no matter what else was going on. When I asked my mother what was wrong with him she said he was a WWI vet and had shell shock.
So you figure he’d been like that since 1918, over forty years. And he’d only seen the battles the Americans were in, not the totally horrific ones like the Somme or Verdun.
DougJ is the business and economics editor for Balloon Juice.
@KG:
And you know who it was who first pointed this out about what reparations would do to Germany? Keynes.
Robert Sneddon
Britain only finished paying off its WWII debt to the US a few years ago. Before the reciprocal declaration of war against Germany on December 1941 the US was only accepting cash on the nail, in gold for the war materiel and food they were shipping to Britain — the Majestic convoys consisted of the Cunard express liners loaded with bullion running at 30 knots well south of the regular U-boat patrols in the Atlantic. After the declaration of war the US was willing to make loans for their Allies to buy weapons and supplies from them.
Mark S.
@DougJ is the business and economics editor for Balloon Juice.:
The original K-thug.
Martin
@Amanda in the South Bay:
Not a chance. We committed 11 million troops and lost 400,000 soldiers during the war. The Soviets committed over 30 million troops and lost over 9 million with 14 million wounded. We had a population of 131 million. If we had needed to commit an additional 30 million and deal with 14 million wounded from a continent away, we wouldn’t have had anywhere near the manufacturing and support capacity to pull it off, and Germany would have had the entire interior of Europe rebuilding and manufacturing in opposition to us.
Airpower was only marginally effective – and that was running sorties that lasted a few hours. To cover 6,000 would have taken a full day. We’d have needed 10 times as many pilots and planes just to drop the same number of bombs. We’d never even have secured a beachead in Europe. We’d have had to launch an invasion force from where – Iceland? Greenland? Canada? We barely pulled it off from 30 miles away, let alone over 1000.
If Germany had even defeated England and controlled the entire Atlantic coast, our only option would have been a stalemate in the Atlantic, go all-in against the Japanese, defeat them, and reinforce the Soviets from the Pacific, and hopefully find a means to get a toehold in Europe by stretching Germany too thin. As the war ran on, Germany would have been able to conscript more and more non-Germans to fight against us.
That's Master of Accountancy to You, Pal (JMN)
@Amanda in the South Bay: It would have been at least the middle of the 1950s before we’d have had the nuclear firepower to win the war exclusively that way. I find it implausible that we’d have continued to fight an inconclusive war for 15 years just on that chance.
Jonny Scrum-half
Athenae — I had the same reaction when the neocons made fun of the “surrender monkeys.” But it wasn’t just WWI, but the entire 30 year period from 1914-1945 — 2 world wars, a Great Depression and the Communist revolution in Russia. That’s a pretty unlucky time to have lived in Europe.
Amanda in the South Bay
@Martin:
google Stuart Slade, TBO, and stardestroyer.net. I thoroughly agree with the idea that we’d get a late 1940s version of Dropshot, except this time against a bloated Nazi empire that’d be nowhere close to building its own nukes, unable to shoot down SAC’s frontline bomber till the late 50s, and stretched thin trying to pacify all of Europe.
jeffreyw
@J.W. Hamner:
Those are some good lookin pies, dude.
That's Master of Accountancy to You, Pal (JMN)
@DougJ is the business and economics editor for Balloon Juice.:
Maybe, but he was wrong. What did in the German economy wasn’t the size of the reparations, but rather the fact that the Germans opted to destroy their currency rather than pay them. It’s possible that Germany wouldn’t have been able to pay them, and need to renegotiate, but they didn’t even try.
This becomes even more inexcusable after 1925, because the reparations were renegotiated, hence the fact that they just got around to repaying them. The problem was that the Germans simply refused to recognize that they had been beaten, or that they were primarily responsible for turning a localized Balkan crisis into a world war.
Keynes’ treatise needs to be read more as a matter of Whitehall infighting and bureaucratic axe-grinding, rather than a serious analysis of the peace treaty.
Mark S.
You guys are all wrong. Germany would have built the spaceship to Alpha Centauri and won the space race before we could have achieved domination victory.
J.W. Hamner
@jeffreyw:
Thanks! We’ve had a lot of practice lately, so I’m glad it’s showing…. in fact, we’ve made soooooo many pizzas over the last month I’m really ready to… hell… just make a sandwich for a change.
Mike in NC
So many atrocities, it boggles the mind. We visited the Czech Republic last summer and the fate of Lidice is hard to grasp. Not only did the Nazis wipe out the entire living village, the wiped out the cemeteries.
frosty
@Mark S.: I’ve suspected that one reason for the number of casualties on the Eastern Front was the fact that Russia hadn’t signed the Geneva Convention. Getting taken prisoner was not a good option for either side, so they tended to fight to the death more than on the Western Front.
Same thing may have been a factor in the Pacific, as well.
Martin
@Amanda in the South Bay: We would have thrown in the towel. The resource commitment to retake Europe would have been deemed impossible. We’d most likely have given up that fight and worked to support an insurgency campaign within the defeated populations and then re-enter later, or we’d have just gotten over it and sold them a lot of shit and made money. We’re not above that, after all.
MikeJ
@Martin: One reason we might have stopped fighting was the Republican party calling it Rosenfelt’s war.
DonkeyKong
Well, as long as we’re on the subject of Nazi atrocities, please rent Come and See. The movie was made in the Soviet Union in 1985 by Elem Klimov.
He never made a film after that. It seems he said all he could say. Rumor has it that when Kubrick saw it he was compeled to abandoned a 20 year attempt to make a film about the Final Solution.
As far as the war in the Pacific, read War without Mercy by John Dower. The War and the Pacific and the Eastern Front War had alot in common as far as savagery.
Mike in NC
@DonkeyKong:
“The Eagle Against the Sun” by Ronald Spector is great, as is “Touched with Fire: The Land War in the South Pacific” by Eric Bergerud. Amazing book. My dad spent 1943-45 living in the jungles of New Guinea and the Philippines. Unfortunately he developed Alzheimer’s in 2002 and couldn’t read it himself.
Annamal
Kripkao, for all that it was on the other side of the world, WW1 absolutely devastated the populations of Australia and New Zealand as well, to the point where no family at the time was untouched.
Kids from both countries are still making pilgrimages to Gallipoli and the Somme to memorialise relatives and anscestors ( my own grandparents visited Belgium in 2008 to follow in the tracks of my great grandfather who survived but didn’t really).
DonkeyKong
I’m sorry about your father Mike in NC. My condolances. Could he ever bring himself to talk about it before then?
asiangrrlMN
@J.W. Hamner: Nommilicious!
@WereBear: Thank you so much for posting this pic of the adorable Tristan and the very gorgeous Olwyn. I so needed it.
Stefan
That’s the damn truth, and I would say they did much more than half. I read once that ninety percent of the casualties Germany suffered were on the Eastern front.
Not quite, but it was about eighty percent.
Phoenician in a time of Romans
@Amanda in the South Bay:
And the USSR couldn’t have won (or at the least penetrated very far past the pre-war boarder of the USSR) without American lend lease-trucks, lots of trucks, food, boots, etc.
Er, nope. The high point of the German campaign, the grab for Moscow failed a week before the first major shipments of lend lease material arrived in Moscow. The material certainly helped, but the USSR had already won by that stage (or, to be more accurate, the Germans had already lost, and what was left was the slow grinding and bloody push back to Berlin)
Phoenician in a time of Romans
And, by the way, anyone interested in this should give the computer game “Hearts of Iron II” a go (prefer it to HoI3, personally).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hearts_of_Iron_II
Ailuridae
I have a sudden desire to play Axis and Allies.
That's Master of Accountancy to You, Pal (JMN)
@Phoenician in a time of Romans: The Germans failed to win the war by Pearl Harbor. I’d argue that their shot to actually defeat the Soviet Union had disappeared by the fourth week of Operation Barbarossa, in the middle of the previous July.
That’s not the same thing as saying that the Red Army could have made it to Berlin. Soviet logistics depended very heavily upon Lend lease. Amanda mentions the food, uniforms and trucks. Throw in radios. None of those were the most important items we sent them. During the course of the war, the US supplied almost 100% of the new locomotives, rolling stock and rails the Soviets put into service. Their ability to conduct large scale offensive operations depended upon Lend Lease.
On their own, the Soviets may have managed to avoid defeat. The likely result would have been stalemate.
Interrobang
My cousin just took a bunch of kids from her high school to the WWII anniversary in Ortona, Italy this year, and went to a bunch of places in Europe for other anniversaries last year. Canada lost 1% of its population in WWI; in a country of (then) 7.2M people, that was a big deal.
And keep in mind while you Americans are giving yourself strokes about the world wars — WWI started in 1914, and WWII started in 1939, but you guys seemed to be chronically tardy (while selling materiel to both sides). So fuck you all just a little bit.
Amanda in the South Bay
@Phoenician in a time of Romans:
There’s a big difference between clearing the Germans out of the pre-war boundaries of the USSR, and going all the way to Berlin.
Amanda in the South Bay
@That’s Master of Accountancy to You, Pal (JMN):
Probably Brest-Litovsk part II would be the outcome
Amanda in the South Bay
@Martin:
Hence the genesis of the B-36 in 1940, when it seemed as if Britain would fall, and the only way to bomb Germany would be from North America. Add in the Manhattan Engineering District, the grossly incompetent German atomic bomb project, and it really doesn’t matter if the US can actually invade Western Europe. In the late 1940s Germany gets turned into a radioactive wasteland.
Sloegin
Well this sucks.
Germany has managed to pay off a war. This means they can start saving for the next one.
mclaren
The French boast by far the most glorious military history of any nation on earth. Only one guy ever actually conquered all of Europe and successfully named himself its emperor — Napoleon. Charles Martel saved Western civilisation in the Battle of Tours in 732 A.D. The Gauls defeated the Roman empire, sacked Rome, and demanded tribute in 387 A.D. How many other nations managed that?
If there are two peoples you don’t want to go to war against, it’s got to be the French and the Mongols, in that order.
Martin Gifford
= myth (the bolded part). German politicians used it as an excuse for domestic consumption, then Hitler used it too.
Germany lost about 2 million lives and other nations lost 8 million lives. In some countries, whole generations were lost. And Germany was an occupier who did damage to other nations but had no damage done to itself.
The idea that reparations were excessive, is just politicians’ attempts at claiming victimhood and pointing externally for someone to blame.
SRW1
Interesting bit of history, but unfortunately it gets the facts somewhat wrong. What really happened is roughly along the following lines:
In 1922 Germany did not deliver the full amount of reparations due for that year according to the Treaty of Versailles. The Reparations Commission issued a declaration to that effect and the French government then ordered the occupation of the Rhineland, a sanction foreseen in the treaty for such cases.
The German government responded by declaring a general strike in the Rhineland.To provide a means of support for the people there, the German government started printing money, which set off a bout of inflation that spiraled into gigantic proportions (and inoculated the German people with a paranoia towards inflation that persists until this day).
After a while the German government realized that it was never going to prevail in this confrontation with the French and started negotiations, in which the French insisted on the reparations being paid. As German finances were in an abysmal state, there was no way to do so with resources from within the country. So the Germans issued bonds on the international market to raise the money required.
The reparations remained a contentious issue until a moratorium was declared in 1931, followed by attempts to come to a final settlement on the Lausanne Conference in 1932. Although that endeavor failed, due to the US Congress rejecting the outcome of the conference, the conference effectively marked the end of reparations, of which Germany had paid about one eighth of the amount foreseen in the Treaty of Versailles.
When Hitler came to power, he refused to honor the bonds issued in 1923. However, the government of Western Germany resumed their payment after WW II and what has happened now, and has been hailed as the formal end of WW I, is that the German government has made the last installment of repaying the bonds.
Concerning the reparations in the Treaty of Versailles, the fact is that Germany paid about one eighth of the sum foreseen and reparations ended in 1931.
R-Jud
@J.W. Hamner: Thanks for that link. It’s pizza night here at Chez Jud, and I had been using my big cast iron as a “stone” in the oven. This method bears trying out.
Also, I’m glad to see I’m not the only person who makes dough for Friday night on Wednesday morning. Long fermentation FTW.
DPirate
I expect Bismarck to attack within 10 turns.